Two By Five

This October marks the third anniversary of the very first meeting of the Secret Mixed Tape Society. The origin of our group stems from a challenge. One day, Brandon emailed me a list of his Top Five Bands Of All Time, and dared me to follow suit. I won't post his here (as usual, I invite him to do so on his own), but the ones I came up with were: Tom Waits, Johnny Cash, Primus, the Beastie Boys and Camper Van Beethoven (in no particular order, of course). We both had come up with numerous bands who we had felt a passion for over the years, but the hardest part was having to sit down and narrow these lists down to only five. Things we took into consideration were how long we'd appreciated said band, the number of records owned, the extent at which we sought out particular items connected to said band, etc. I had my list narrowed down to seven. I ousted the final two, only, due to the extent of time I'd been listening to them in comparison to the other five. It would be accurate to point out that, within this frame of time, Brandon's line-up shifted around a bit as well.

Now that we had each devised our lists, what do we do with them? We came up with the idea of burning a CD-R which represented particular songs by each group. But how many songs each? How many songs total? I got to thinking about it and wondered how I could possibly showcase each band evenly, but without making the mix too long. One important concept to the art of the mix is to hold the listener's interest throughout. Thus, the best possible solution would be to have only ten songs, with two songs by each artist. Why two songs? The idea was to showcase more than one side of the band. On my own mix what I chose to do was have the first song be from the earlier half of the band's career, and the second song be from the latter half. Once I had all the songs selected, I would put them in chronological order.

I shared this idea with Brandon, who liked what he heard. After each of our mixes were finished, we figured we'd take it a step further and ask Jeff to participate. Jeff liked the idea and suggested we all get together and have a night-in to have dinner and drinks, and then listen to each mix individually.

We listened to, and appreciated, each of the other's comps. By night's end, we decided that we would do it again but, this time, with a different theme altogether. As I've mentioned in the past, the only stipulations of a mix are that they be ten songs and that each person try to use a band only once. As you may be able to tell from the cover of my 2x5, my mix consists of eleven songs. I had decided to cheat and put one more song by Camper Van Beethoven on my mix. It was their version of Fleetwood Mac's "Tusk," which, I didn't want to necessarily use since it's not really their song, but felt that I had to simply because of its brilliance. Of course, in true mixed tape etiquette, I didn't bother listing the song on the original cover. Thus making it a "hidden track."